Kirk Warner’s Published Iraq War Stories Get Rave Review in the North Carolina State Bar Journal

The North Carolina State Bar Journal this month features a rave review on Smith Anderson attorney Kirk Warner’s book, Zone of Action: A JAG’s Journey Inside Operations Cobra II and Iraqi Freedom, about his inside-the-war-room experiences during the march to Baghdad and the nation-building beyond. In Zone of Action Kirk recounts his war-theater observations as a Judge Advocate General (JAG), at the highest levels of the Army and the Coalition, throughout the liberation and occupation of Iraq.

"With equal parts humor, legal insight, and humanity, Warner offers a vivid portrait of a Middle Eastern land consumed by violence, privation and chaos," G. Gray Wilson, an attorney with Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough and past-president of the North Carolina State Bar and North Carolina Bar Association writes in the review in the State Bar’s summer journal. "His job as a lawyer was simple - bring the nation back to a semblance of civilization and order by imposing basic standards of human decency embodied in the law."

But the job wasn’t so simple. When Warner arrives in Baghdad, Kirk notes that "he is tapped to restore a judicial system that has historically been a den of corruption, and he sums up the challenge as follows: ‘With a few sporting prohibitions against gender, race, and religious discrimination, a pinch of due process here and equal protections there, and deleting the interesting provisions making a wife a slave, we would have a good starting point for the Lady of Justice to hang her balances.'"

Check out the full review here.